Yesterday I was at the playground with my son, age 2. A little girl about 6 years old arrived with her father and all the kids started playing, running around, etc as kids do. The girl who had arrived a few minutes earlier let out a typical (well a little louder and longer than most) high-pitched little-girl squeal/shriek during play. Her father strode over, took the little girl by the hand and said “I told you when we got here that there will be NO screaming”. Then he marched her, crying, off to their car and they left.
Granted, the child’s squeal was VERY loud and quite long in duration, and I gotta admit it would have started irritating me had she kept doing it over and over. But crimey, that’s what lots of little girls do though, isn’t it?
My questions are:
Is this squealing a learned behavior or involuntary? Attention-seeking brattiness or just overexcitement? If it is involuntary, why don’t little boys of that age also squeal/shriek? Can 6 year old girls control this, or is it something they just…do?
Was this an overly strict father, or just one who puts up with no nonsense from his kid?
My sister’s son is 2, almost 3, and he has a squeal that could peel paint off the walls.
I live right across the street from a hill that is popular for sledding in the winter. Children of both sexes squeal at full volume while going down the hill. Maybe girls do it more often, but I can assure you that boys are equally capable of those screams. It is fun when they do it at 8 AM on Saturday mornings, let me tell you. I really wish the parents would step in and tell them to keep it down a bit, there are houses all around.
Gee, in answer to the 1st question - I honestly don’t know. I’m not a socioligist nor a learned person in the field of psychology.
However, in relation to Point (2) - gee, you know, it’s a very easy thing for a 3rd party on the sideline to make a negative judgement call on the father as being “too strict or too oppressive”. But to be fair, it’s not as though the father smacked his little girl, or totally lost it and went psycho in her presence, is it?
My gut feeling is this - the father recognises that his little girl is still going through the learning stages of acceptable social behaviour and he chose to use the playground as an example of setting “limits” of some sort.
Certainly, I’m a daddy nowadays to a 13 month old little girl, and yes, even at 13 months, she’s doing the tantrum thingey on occasion if she doesn’t get exactly what she wants when she wants it - but she’s also learning that a strong response along the lines of “uh uh!” means she’s reaching a limit too. And I know I’d be mortified if a child of mine ruined a playground experience for other toddlers due to a lack of manners and good behaviour - so my belief is that the father in question was doing his best to a be a good dad for both his daughter and everyone else at the playground I rather think.
I was hoping this was going to be a thread pitting little girls who scream.
So many times, I’ve sat down for a meal in a (usually low-priced) restaraunt, my food in front of me, the delicate aroma wafting towards my head as my saliva glands begin to crank out the juice. All is good in the wor–EEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! A brain-splitting note at least two dozen octaves above middle C rings out. For the duration of the note, it feels like there’s a family of horny voles rutting in my head. I temporarily shore up the holes in my bleeding heart to allow a feeling intense hatred towards the snot-faced yuppie-spawned crotch-apple emitting the note to briefly take root in my mind. Typically this feeling of loathing quickly gets transferred to the mother, who either ignores it or tells the screaming little storkcident that she’ll buy the doll/candy/toy/pony/whatever tomorrow. Then it ends, my heart starts oozing, I feel love for the world, and I continue my meal.
I, for one, applaud the father mentioned in the OP.
I took my nephews ages 9, 10, 12 to Disneyland on New Years Eve. 2 of the kids, my brother and me were on the Indiana Jones ride. We were sitting behind some middle aged ladies. Well those ladies were screaming their heads off like little girls until I realized it was my 10 yr old nephew screaming like a little girl. I reached over and tapped him to make him stop cause I figured he was making those ladies go deaf since he was SCREAMING in their ears. So yes little boys scream just like little girls.
That father obviously doesn’t understand the difference between inside and outside voice. That little girl should have been allowed to scream all she wanted, she was outside and playing. Poor thing, I would hate to have to pay for her therapy bills later.
Well . . . I don’t know. Screeching and screaming can be pretty annoying, whether it be inside or out. If I’m outside somewhere, I sure as hell don’t want to hear some loud and prolonged high-pitched screaming. A little giggling, squawks, whatever, are to be expected, but the OP described this as VERY LOUD AND LONG. That’s not okay. Inside, outside, doesn’t matter—that’s flat-out obnoxious. We are just so used to kids doing this that we think that they must do it. But I don’t think that’s the case.
Context is everything, Deb. My kids–one boy and one girl–both have had at various times the habit of shrieking piercingly when angered or thwarted. How piercingly, you’re lucky never to have experienced. Inside or outside, that’s not acceptable. We don’t know if this child was squealing in excitement, or screaming at her playmates in anger. If it was the latter, the father may well have been doing the best he could to stop such behavior. So it’s not at all obvious that the father doesn’t understand the difference between inside and outside voice–it’s just one of several possibilities.
Oh, and I wanted to say above, the fact that the father had clearly discussed the issue with the girl before coming to the playground tells me he’s very likely dealing with a persistent behavior issue, and not just demanding the girl be silent even outdoors.
I don’t have cites or facts per se, but I never shrieked during play time as a child. Maybe it’s a girl thing, no clue.
I despise shrieking. I’ve never had any kids, but when I first heard the little girl next door shrieking, it scared the crap out of me. I thought she was hurt…twenty seconds later she and her brother were giggling. The father did the right thing in my opinion. The only time a child should shriek like that is when they’re in danger. Taking her home might seem like a harsh lesson, but both of them are the better for it.
Bad memories, man. You’ve released bad memories. Worked as a ticket-taker ( Teamsters union, by the way - always amused me ) in my callow youth and I will never forget the sheer agony and atavistic terror generated by the high-pitched squeals of tens of thousands overexcited, mostly female pre- and barely pubescent News Kids on the Block fans.
Sounds to me like this is an Issue (capital I) with the child in question, and this was undoubtedly not the first, but more likely the hundred-and-first time her father had to deal with it. And it is almost certainly not involuntary behavior. Children are people, not insects. They can control themsleves. They may not want to, but they can. And they will, if their parents insist on it.
Without knowing more about the situation than what’s been presented here, I’m gonna agree. It DOES sound like this little girl has a problem with controlling her shrieks. And, again without knowing more about the situation, I’d say that her daddy (or male parental figure, whatever) is actually using the most effective discipline he can. Little girl wants to play in the playground, fine, but the rule is that she can’t screech. If she screeches, she has to quit playing. He is NOT smacking her butt, he’s not physically harming her in any way, he’s just calmly reinforcing his earlier statement that if she does this behavior, then she will have to accept the consequences. I’d say that he’s doing her and everyone she ever meets in the future a favor.
Yeah, I’m with Bren and Lynn, this sounds like a persistent issue (not necessarily a ‘problem’) that the father has been making a point of. At that point to maintain his authority he has to remove her from the playground for being loud.
Not that I mind it. When I take my little girl to a playground I look for a certain amount of running and screaming…it’s what kids do (and, frankly, it makes it easier to keep track of where she is when she’s moving at c-1mph). Clearly the father thought the kid was outside the normal bounds for this behavior and was attempting to control it. Well enough.
And for me (as a boy) it wasn’t ‘making noise’…
Once we learned (someone about 7 or 8) that you started breathing when you passed out we convinced each other that holding our breaths until we passed out was cool because we’d start breathing again when we hit the floor.
The high-pitches squeal or scream does seem more like a girl thing than a boy thing. I have a boy and a girl and, while my boy and his friends did plenty of shouting, it was only the girls who squealed like that. At any rate, my daughter wasn’t allowed to scream – even outside – unless (and this was what I told her) someone had been injured. She (and her brother) could shout outside, but not inside. Again, unless someone was injured.
As far as the OP, I’m with the several others who feel that it looked like the Dad was dealing (appropriately) with an ongoing issue.
You are so going to get it for this. Just you wait until the breeder brigade gets ahold of this and berates you for being a selfish child-hater. Until that time, please be advised that the above did, in fact, make me laugh so hard that my ass did, in fact, fall off.
Now, now, tdn. I’m a card-carrying member of the breeder brigade, and I laughed too. I believe a parent’s role to is to discipline his/her child - and by discipline, I mean “teach”, not “beat the hell out of.” The Daddy in the OP did exactly as he should have. Screaming is not acceptable social behavior unless one is in danger. Sure, some squealing in excitement is permissable in children (and 40-year old women who watch Queer Eye For The Straight Guy), but if the squeal is such that it causes unwitting witnesses’ ears to bleed, it’s too much.
